Black and grey tattoo of shaded feathers hanging from lace-like ornament across the outer thighs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathers and lace ornament on both thighs

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two thighs show matching tattoos of long feathers hanging from ornamental scrolls, paisley-like motifs and fine lace patterns, joined by strings of dots and beads. The feathers are shaded with soft grey gradients, while the ornament is mostly crisp black linework and stippling. The photograph is taken at an angle in warm, low light, with the tattoos filling most of the frame.

Realism Thigh Feather Paisley Ornament Lace pattern Bead Dot Scroll

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves on the coal box and mind the kettle, it's older than your mothers. This is the winter the Mary Ellen froze solid at Stillwater Lock, with Ada Pellow aboard her and nothing worth carrying but her father's lace frame and a sack of dried peas.

Keep reading

Ada strung her late mother's collars across the cabin roof on waxed thread, with jet beads knotted between them, so every draught set them knocking like a clock with nowhere to be. Grey heron feathers hung from the scrolls, long and heavy at the tips. She told the lock keeper they would call a boat up from the sea when the thaw came. He laughed at her, and then he stopped laughing, because the wind came off the water through the cabin and every feather swung the one way, downstream, towards the tide.

Each morning she counted the beads and wrote the number on the frost of the window. Thirty-one, then thirty, then twenty-six. The lock keeper's boy said the feathers pointed at the sea because that was where her father had gone, and Ada threw a peas sack at him and told him nobody asked a lace frame anything.

Then one still February morning the feathers all turned round at once, pointing up the cut, and there was a man on the towpath with a canvas bag over his shoulder and her father's coat buttoned wrong. So when you hear the beads knocking on a still night, don't you go to the window. That's only the lace keeping count, and it hasn't finished yet.